Please get your facts straight!

For anyone looking at the current misinformation (deliberate or not) being spread around by some of the media, mostly in the US, but progressively abroad, the outlook is grim. The media are incredibly powerful at creating and destroying giants. Deliberately spreading false claims and erroneous statistics is more than enough to get people scared. It’s a powerful technique, it has been used by journalists since the dawn of time, and it’ll continue to be used, as long as there is a purpose: spinning the facts to make them fit our purpose.

And what might that purpose be? As far as I can tell, just a simple one: selling articles. The current style of what has been brought in the news — and from serious sources like Time, which in turn have spawned a whole new range of misleading articles on “the end of Second Life” or, more correctly, how Second Life is actually empty. Apparently Ren Reynolds on Terra Nova was right.

The major issue, however, is that serious, honest journalists are mostly clueless on a single aspect of Second Life: they have no background on metrics, and so their experiences come simply from observation and anecdotal evidence. But… can we really blame them? Web metrics don’t apply to Second Life — or do they?

Like this:

Linden Lab introduces the “First Look” series of viewers as an “unstable branch” of the Second Life viewer. This allows developers to fully exploit new technological advances without fear of “breaking” the “normal” viewer. The result? In a month, we got a completely new rendering pipeline, giving us back the performance lost since the olden days of the 1.4 viewer, by moving the rendering into OpenGL calls done on the graphic card’s hardware. A nice side-effect is that the “shiny” feature now does mirroring, a feat that was deemed impossible a few years ago!